Sasuke and Shiro
by Lucillia
Summary: Sasuke is forced to balance fatherhood with his duties as an Academy Student and later Ninja when an infant cousin also survives the massacre.
1. Prologue: An Extra Survivor

"Please remain quiet little one." Itachi silently pleaded as his eyes flicked over to his companion. The last three times he had tried to spare the children of a household, the man had not hesitated to kill them himself. On one level, he was sickened by this. But, on another, he was somewhat relieved because he'd been ordered to kill the entire clan, and if his companion killed the little ones, he wouldn't have to.

Killing those who had been involved in the planning of the coup hadn't been all that difficult. They had been traitors to the village. Killing those who knew but said nothing out of fear of what would happen to their relatives had been a little harder. Killing the clan's Genin and Academy students had been even more difficult. Killing the clan's children was the hardest of all, and he tended to leave that up to his companion who shadowed him like a wraith, blocking blows from those who were now his enemy that he couldn't let through until his grim task was complete.

He held a small hope that if some of the smallest children survived, the Hokage would spare their lives. The Hokage wasn't heartless, and he would have to be blind to not see the use of having Uchiha around that were too young to clearly remember their traitorous clan, and could be raised to be loyal to the village.

As Madara who had aided him in that night's slaughter watched, his kunai arced downward toward his three day-old cousin. Fortunately, Shiro did not wake when it impacted the crib's mattress. The child's luck held as he remained asleep and therefore completely silent throughout the rest of the massacre, unknowing of the fact that his mother's dead body rested on the floor next to his crib.

&!&!&

The morning after the massacre, as the ANBU ghosted through the silent streets of the Uchiha district recording everything they saw and cleaning up the crime scene before the gawkers could come out in force, Sparrowhawk's ears pricked up when he thought he heard...No, impossible, it was the situation getting to him. The grim task of cataloging and storing bodies had been bringing back some very bad memories of a certain week eight years before. Memories of silent streets filled with the dead which had haunted his nightmares and now haunted him as he drifted through more silent streets filled with dead bodies.

When he thought he heard the sound a second time, he decided to follow it just in case he wasn't hearing things. Eventually, the weak wails that he soon realized were real led him to a house in the middle of the Uchiha District. Following the noise upstairs, he found a nursery. The woman who lay sprawled out on the floor, her hand reaching towards the crib that occupied the space in front of the window was dead. The infant in the crib however was alive. There was a hole in the mattress next to the baby that had been made by a kunai strike. Itachi had apparently missed on purpose for some unknown reason.

It would seem that the massacre had two survivors, Uchiha Sasuke, and Uchiha Shiro.

&!&!&

Sarutobi Hiruzen listened to the concerns of his council. The opinions of his former teammates mirrored those of the Clan Heads who had already spoken to him about the matter. He too had some misgivings about the decision he'd made, as Uchiha Sasuke was so young and in a rather fragile state at the moment. But, the boy needed something to hold onto right now, and if that something was his infant cousin, so be it. It wasn't as if he would leave the children completely unsupervised, and family belonged together.

"Your concerns do have merit, but as Uchiha Shiro's only surviving family member besides Itachi, Sasuke does have some say in where he goes, and he has already spoken, loudly and repeatedly on this matter." the Sandaime said to the two people who had served alongside him since they had been younger that Uchiha Sasuke was now. "I will assign a caretaker to supervise the both of them, and teach Sasuke the skills he will need in order to care for his young charge."

With that, the matter was settled. Well, as settled as it was ever going to be with people constantly questioning it and bringing it up in hopes of convincing him to change the outcome to one that was more favorable to themselves.

**Edited 3/17/2012**


	2. Childcare and Itachi's Dangerous Game

It wasn't the first time in the history of Konoha that an older sibling who was still legally a child became the sole guardian of a younger sibling - or in this case cousin - after a disaster. Senju Hashirama himself had spent some time tending to his younger half-brother after his mother and step-father died until the head of the Senju clan had seen something in them and had adopted them as his own. After the Kyuubi attack, such a situation had been almost common, with one extreme case of an eleven year-old academy student being forced to look after three younger siblings and a cousin - who had been his immediate family's only survivor, having lost both parents and a sibling - while living in one of the small tent cities that had sprung up in the destroyed neighborhoods where hundreds had been left homeless standing out.

Fortunately for Sasuke, he and his second cousin had inherited the bulk of the Uchiha clan's monetary resources, which consisted of the life savings of every Uchiha and the "common pool" that every Uchiha contributed part of their pay to in case they ended up incapacitated and unable to work, and therefore weren't dependent upon an orphan stipend that could be delayed during a financial crisis. While taken individually, each Uchiha had been about middle middle-class, maybe a little higher like his parents, or a little lower like one of the least popular members of the clan, a man named Kenichi whose shack had repeatedly been declared an eyesore. Altogether, the sum of all of those accounts combined added up to a staggering amount of money.

When it came to caring for Shiro, Sasuke would want for nothing, except experience, and perhaps patience. Experience was something that the young Uchiha was now gaining the hard way. Patience would come to him eventually.

When Sasuke and his cousin had gotten home from the hospital, the new caretaker who was in Sasuke's opinion a vicious old hag had shown him how to hold, feed, and change his baby cousin, and promptly left for the meeting of the Uchiha Madara fan club of which she was a second generation member. Leaving him and Shiro to fend for themselves for the rest of the day.

On a side note, upon his return to the village prior to the massacre, Madara had been dismayed to discover that he was no longer the sole focus of the club which had merely kept his name out of tradition. Fan club meetings had merely become an excuse to gossip about anything and everything while plotting the annual attack against the Senju Hashirama Fan Club which also had only kept its name out of tradition over the years. The annual fights between the Uchiha Madara and Senju Hashirama were a village tradition that was eagerly anticipated by a large number of villagers who wagered over the outcome of said matches as per tradition.

Shiro, who was now back to full health after coming down with a respiratory infection following the Massacre, started bawling his tiny lungs out less than ten minutes after his and Sasuke's caretaker departed. Sasuke checked the diaper the way the old lady had shown him before ditching him, and found it to be dry. He tried giving his cousin milk from the bottle the biddy had prepared only for Shiro to turn his face away and refuse it. He wasn't wet, and he wasn't hungry. Why else would he be crying?

Sasuke found that felt like crying himself, since he didn't know what to do. Thinking that perhaps one of the nurses at the hospital would know what to do, he set out. He didn't want to see their looks of pity, he hated those, but he was at his wit's end.

&!&!&!&!&

"I am disappointed in you Itachi." Madara said the instant he closed the door to the teenager's new, rather spartan, and as of yet undecorated rooms, dropping his "Tobi" personality which tended to cause a bit of confusion amongst those who knew of his existence due to the fact that there was a Tobi out there who also acted like "Tobi", leaving them wondering if they were talking to Tobi or Madara himself. The fact that Tobi claimed that he too was Madara also added to the confusion of the situation.

Immediately following the massacre, Itachi had followed his fellow clansman to Ame where he was introduced to Pein as a potential - translated: he's already been recruited you just need to pretend to give him your stamp of approval - recruit. Following his acceptance into the criminal organization called the Akatsuki which was nominally led by Pein, he had been given the set of quarters on one of the lower floors of the tower that Pein had claimed for himself upon becoming leader of the rain drenched country which he and Madara were currently occupying. He had then been subsequently informed by his new partner Hoshigaki Kisame - who had dropped by for a short visit, bringing a small house-warming present with him - that the quarters he'd been given were going to be seldom used, as he would most likely be sent on a large number of missions that would keep him away for weeks or even months at a time.

"Why?" Itachi asked, looking up from the kunai he'd been sharpening, pretending to not be bothered by the intrusion his relative had made in what was supposed to be his personal space. A set of five completed kunai were lined up on the bed to his left six more which were yet to be sharpened were lined up on his right.

"The agreement was for the entire clan barring you, me, and your younger brother to die." Madara said. If Itachi was going to play coy then so be it. He would remind the child exactly who was in charge, and what happened to people who played games with him when the brat least expected it.

"And?" Itachi asked. He knew he was playing a dangerous game, but he'd committed himself to this path when he had allowed his newborn cousin to live.

"There was another survivor." Madara stated flatly, carefully watching Itachi's reaction.

"Yes, the baby Shiro. I figured that since he was a descendant of Izuna's, you wouldn't have wanted me to kill him." Itachi said, attempting to imply that Izuna's descendants had been extremely rare prior to the clan's demise. There was no way he was going to let slip the little fact that was discovered through genetic testing a few years back that Uchiha Izuna had really gotten around, and that half the clan was descended from the man. This had proven problematic, as even with the Uchiha's careful breeding program the entire clan would be descended from Uchiha Madara's younger brother in another couple of generations. His father had had this information suppressed upon discovering to his mortification that despite what was stated in the clan records, his wife was his first cousin once removed.

"Do not presume to know what I want!" Madara snapped as he slapped the irritating boy across the face.

Without seeming to be even trying to do so, the pacifistic brat who had been infected with the Senju Will of Fire had always managed to do things that caused him the most aggravation. While the child Shiro was immaterial to his plans, there was the fact that Itachi had defied him and he couldn't allow the boy to get away with such disrespect.

On the other hand however, Shiro was of Izuna's blood, and he'd loved Izuna. While he could rationalize the need for the infant's demise with the fact that the child's blood had been tainted with the blood of those traitors who had turned their backs on him, he would know that he had destroyed the last chance for his brother's line to continue should he kill the child.

It was there that the aggravation lay. If he allowed the infant to survive, Itachi would take it as a victory, unless... Unless Itachi had spared the child, knowing that he would kill it himself, and wanted him to go through the trauma of wiping out his precious brother's line with his own two hands as Itachi had been forced to wipe out most of that nest of traitors, and therefore would be victorious in this little game by forcing him to kill the child. It was one of those gods damned Catch 22s. He would quite likely be damned if he did, but he would also likely be damned if he didn't. Either way, there was a chance of Itachi scoring a win, **which he would not allow**.

He would have to do what he'd been forced to do in the past when the way forward was uncertain, and adopt a wait and see policy in this situation...

&!&!&!&!&

Hyuuga Hiashi scowled as he watched the Uchiha child wander about the village carrying a wailing infant in an extremely awkward position. His wife had cured him of such stupidity before Hinata was a week old. From the looks of things, the boy was tiring and would soon drop the baby if he wasn't careful. Why Sarutobi had allowed such an irresponsible child to care for an infant was beyond him.

Suppressing a sigh, he walked up to the boy.

"You're holding it wrong." he said as soon as he was face to face with the child who was improperly tending to his young cousin.

"If you're so smart, why don't you show me!" the child who was obviously nearing the end of his patience snapped back.

His only response to this impudence was to scowl at the disrespect he'd been shown, snatch the improperly dressed infant who hadn't even been bundled against the weather out of the boy's arms, grab the boy's shoulder, and forcefully guide him towards the Hyuuga compound. This brat who was going to be the head of the Uchiha Clan and therefore almost his equal in a few short years had alot to learn, and the first lesson was going to be in childcare.

&!&!&!&!&

Sasuke scowled up at Hyuuga Hiashi. The man had dragged him to his home against his will, calling him several names along the way, including stupid and brainless. He was far from stupid, he was one of the geniuses of the Uchiha clan, and nothing this second-rate Uchiha wannabe with a stick up his ass the size of a flagpole - as cousin Shisui used to call him - could say would make him believe otherwise. As soon as the man who had an iron grip on his shoulder was in the section of the compound that was reserved for the Main Branch, he summoned a member of the Branch House.

"Get some supplies," the Hyuuga said, gesturing to Shiro who had miraculously quit crying shortly after the man had taken him from him. "The boy didn't think to carry any."

The branch member departed, and returned a few minutes later with a small blanket and various other items as the Hyuuga settled them in what was obviously the man's private study. The Hyuuga promptly spread the blanket out and set Shiro down on it.

"While you can do just about whatever you want as far as I'm concerned, I will not allow an infant to come to harm because of your negligence." the Hyuuga said, coming directly to the point as soon as the baby was settled.

He scowled once more as he watched the man study Shiro with his Byakugan active. He didn't want or need this man's help, and if he was going to continue to be rude to him, he'd just leave.

"We'll be fine. Shihara-san already showed me how to feed him and change his diaper." he snapped as he got ready to pick Shiro up off the blanket where he was napping, and depart.

"And yet, here I find you wandering about the village seconds away from dropping the child who I might add was improperly dressed." the Hyuuga replied, stopping him in his tracks with a glare that reminded him of the one his father used to give him when he was really angry with something he'd done. "The Hokage in his infinite wisdom has allowed you to care for your cousin. You will learn how to do so, and you will learn quickly or I will do all that is in my power to see that the child is removed from your incompetent care. Your first lesson will be in how to properly hold a baby..."

**Edited 3/17/2012.**


	3. Babies in Class

Uchiha Sasuke shifted the bundle that he carried in a sling that Hyuuga Hiashi had given him across his chest as he made his way into the Academy building for the first time in months. Fortunately, Shiro remained asleep as he moved him into a slightly more comfortable position. He had refused to leave his cousin behind while he was at the Academy. Besides the fact that the caretaker that the Hokage had assigned was completely incompetent, and spent most of her time watching the television that his family had bought more for appearances sake, he still couldn't shake his somewhat rational fear of Itachi returning and killing his cousin while he wasn't around.

As soon as he reached his class, he was mobbed by every last one of the girls and some of the boys who had noticed Shiro, and wanted to know everything about him such as why he had brought him here in the first place, and if they could hold him. The feeling of being surrounded made him feel nervous. As the class continued to surround him, he found himself wrapping his arms protectively around his cousin and seeking out possible threats.

&!&!&!&!&

Rookie Academy Instructor Umino Iruka watched as the children of his first Academy class gathered around Uchiha Sasuke and the burden he carried in a sling. He hadn't had any younger siblings at the time of the Kyuubi attack, but if he had, he knew he would have done just what the young Uchiha was doing now. He tensed slightly as he saw a familiar blond approach the group. While he'd recently started seeing signs that the boy was not the Kyuubi or controlled by the Kyuubi as he'd come to believe after eight years of rumors, part of him screamed not to let it near the baby if only to avoid causing it to come to harm due to an ill thought out prank that the boy might pull.

Instead of pulling some stupid prank that could injure or kill the infant, or waking it up with a loud yell as he half expected the boy to do. Uzumaki Naruto stood there studying the child as if he were trying to figure out what it was. Considering the fact that none of the villagers would want the boy within ten feet of their babies, it was entirely and somewhat disturbingly possible that Naruto didn't know what Sasuke's cousin was.

"I found one of those in the trash once." the Uzumaki boy said once he'd finished his examination of the Uchiha boy's burden. "It wasn't moving around like yours is though, maybe it got thrown away because it was broken."

As the Uzumaki's classmates stared at him in shock and horror, Iruka began feeling ill upon coming to the realization of exactly why the Hokage had sent Naruto to the Academy rather than a civilian school despite all of the protests that had been made against his being enrolled here. There was no other life for the child, he was already far too broken to be a civilian, and as long as he didn't cause too many problems, his odd behavior would be better tolerated amongst the Shinobi rank and file where it wasn't so unusual.

He should have already known, considering the fact that the boy had recently been perfectly willing to rob a corpse if it would gain him friends. The would-be corpse-robbing incident and the rescue he'd had to perform had been what had opened his eyes to the fact that the Uzumaki boy was a lonely child who needed guidance rather than a demon or a demon's puppet.

&!&!&!&!&

Sasuke stared at the class clown in shock after he'd made his statement. What the fuck was wrong with that idiot? Most of the moron's jokes were in poor taste, but this, this took the cake. Even the crudest member of his clan had known better than to joke about dead babies. His mother had actually slapped the one idiot who had tried to do so in his presence. His mother never slapped anybody.

"HOW COULD YOU EVEN JOKE ABOUT A THING LIKE THAT?" a pink haired female whose name he hadn't bothered to learn who had recently joined the fan-club that had begun to surround him his first week at the Academy yelled as she hit the blond idiot hard.

"He was telling the truth." A lazy voice called down from somewhere in the vicinity of the back of the room where most of the rejects hung out hoping to avoid the attention of their sensei or their classmates.

"How do you know that Shikamaru?" the Yamanaka who was the pink haired female's constant companion and the biggest thorn in his side asked.

"I can tell when he's joking and when he's lying, and he was doing neither." the lazy voice replied.

Great. Now, he found himself wondering exactly how fucked up someone had to be to think a baby was some sort of toy that got thrown away when it no longer worked. Gods, he'd recently lived through the extermination of his family barring Shiro that had been committed by his beloved older brother, and even he wasn't that messed up. Shit, even his brother who had massacred his clan hadn't been that messed up. He knew that, because he'd seen his brother wipe his eyes shortly after the funeral for the toddler who had fallen in the river.

Come to think of it, it had probably been his brother who had put the toddler in the river. And, if his brother who clearly wasn't as messed up as the Uzumaki could do that...

He would have to watch the "Dead Last" more closely, there was no telling when he could become a serious threat to Shiro's safety, if he wasn't one already...

&!&!&

Haruno Sakura was doing something she rarely, as in almost never, did. She was completely ignoring the lesson. Her focus was instead on the Uchiha boy's charge. She liked babies alot. Her older cousin had allowed her to hold his daughter a few times during one of the rare visits to the family made to Fire Country Capitol in order to visit the rest of the extended family that hadn't settled in Konoha.

Maybe Sasuke would let her hold his cousin after class. She'd like that. And, maybe, when she was grown up, she'd marry Sasuke and give him a dozen other babies that were just as cute as or much cuter than his cousin.

She could see herself in a house surrounded by a bunch of laughing children when she was all grown up.

&!&!&

Yamanaka Ino made a face once her eyes once again rested on the bundle in the sling. She didn't like babies. She had a number of younger cousins, and she'd been forced to help look after them a few times. All babies that young did was eat, sleep, scream, and make messes in their diapers. You couldn't even play with them until they got older, and even then they weren't all that much fun. She didn't know why Iruka-sensei had even let it into class since it was already disrupting the lesson. It would do more than disrupt the lesson when it started crying.

When she became Mrs. Uchiha Sasuke, she'd hire a nanny to take care of any children she and Sasuke might have.

&!&!&

Nara Shikamaru watched as Uchiha Sasuke gently rocked the baby he had brought to class with him in the blue sling that matched his wide collared shirt. Several studies had shown that children from Ninja families tended to mature faster than their civilian counterparts, but he still had serious doubts about Sasuke's chances of success in this endeavor. Child parents had not been studied extensively, and most of the data he had found on said parents had involved teenage mothers. What he'd found in those studies had not been promising. The effects that just the stress of rearing a child would have on the Uchiha's already precarious mental state were rather worrisome. It would probably only be Sasuke's stubborn and somewhat obsessive nature that would keep his cousin from suffering a similar fate to that of the infant Naruto had found.

"Troublesome." he muttered, entirely summing up the situation.

**Edited on 3/17/2012**


	4. One Year Later

Sasuke sighed as he went to grab his cousin who had recently celebrated his first birthday once more. No matter how hard he tried to keep Shiro away from Naruto, he never succeeded. For some strange reason, his little cousin was completely enamored with the blond idiot, and ever since he'd learned how to crawl, he would crawl to Naruto while they were at the Academy.

The last year had been rather difficult, but he and his cousin had managed. A couple months earlier, his first caretaker had been fired, and replaced by a new one who wasn't much better. The woman who couldn't cook worth crap, and constantly treated him like he was a little kid, doing things for him that he could already do on his own, such as tending to Shiro. While he was somewhat grateful for the fact that she'd taken over the 2, 3, and 4 a.m. feedings, he had been doing them just fine himself before she'd arrived.

Naruto hadn't tried to hurt Shiro yet, but he still couldn't help but feel a sense of unease when Shiro was near him. Over the past year, he'd been seeing more and more signs that there was something seriously wrong with the Dead Last, something that was approaching a That Man near the end level of wrongness.

The Uzumaki boy smiled constantly, the Uzumaki laughed, the Uzumaki pulled pranks. On the surface, he looked just like your run of the mill class clown. Beneath that however was something else. The Uzumaki's smile didn't quite reach his eyes, the Uzumaki's laugh was off in a way he couldn't quite describe, the Uzumaki evaded Chunin and even ANBU like it was nothing after he was caught vandalizing some property. The Uzumaki was dangerous.

None of his classmates - except maybe the Nara who saw everything and pretended he didn't - saw what he saw however, and laughed at him when he warned them, calling him overly paranoid.

Overly paranoid? Overly paranoid? The dead last regularly took down Chunin and even a couple of Jounin for Chrissakes, and even the teachers called him paranoid. Of course there was an odd look in their eyes as they did so as if they'd seen what he had, but they still said it.

&!&!&!&

Naruto smiled as Sasuke's baby grabbed the leg of his trousers and started pulling himself up into a standing position. He liked having Sasuke's baby around, it was almost like having a friend. Sasuke's baby smiled when he saw him, and liked to spend time with him. He couldn't play with the baby, but that was okay, having it around was more than good enough.

The Old Man had informed him that babies were delicate, could break easily, and that it was a very bad thing if they were broken because they couldn't be fixed they day Sasuke had first brought his baby to class, and several times afterward. Babies weren't toys. They were like those delicate dolls that his landlady kept on a high shelf and never let anyone touch, except they moved around and made noise, and didn't go on a shelf because they could fall off and get hurt. The Old Man had also told him to tell him if he ever found any broken babies or other children so that the people who broke them could be properly punished.

Much to his discredit, it had taken him almost a week to realize that in the case of babies and small children, broken the way the baby he'd once found in the trash a long time ago meant dead like that old lady that used to live downstairs. He was usually a bit quicker on the uptake despite the fact that he didn't have people to tell him these things.

You couldn't fix or come back from dead, and he didn't want that to happen to Sasuke's baby ever, not if he could help it.

&!&!&!&

Iruka sighed as he watched Sasuke grab a now wailing Shiro away from Naruto. He'd tried to reassure Sasuke that Naruto would never hurt Shiro, at least not on purpose, but to no avail. The boy stubbornly believed that Naruto was a threat to his cousin, a belief that was causing some of Naruto's classmates who had seemed to be warming up to him before to further distance themselves from him as they searched for the signs of whatever it was that Sasuke supposedly saw. Shiro genuinely liked Naruto, and Naruto liked the infant back. Due to this, the baby was safe in the boy's company, and exempt from the boy's pranks thanks to lectures from him and the Hokage.

He'd watched Sasuke and Shiro carefully over the past year. In the beginning, Sasuke had constantly come to class showing signs of serious sleep deprivation that had most likely been caused by three a.m. feedings for the first several months that he'd had the boy. But eventually, Shiro had apparently started sleeping through the night, and so too had Sasuke. Now that Sasuke was getting the necessary amount of sleep, his marks were climbing back to where they had been prior to the Massacre which had stunned the entire village which had started to grow complacent in the years since the Kyuubi attack.

Sasuke had refused his offer of a playpen at the front of the class or on the sidelines during outside lessons when he had made it shortly after it became clear that his bringing his cousin to class hadn't been a temporary thing. He'd tried to force the issue because of the number of disturbances the child had caused, especially when started moving on his own and making breaks either for freedom or for one of Sasuke's classmates, usually Naruto, but he had gotten a severe letter from the council for "not being accommodating to the Uchiha's needs", and he'd dropped it. It wasn't worth the possibility of his being fired or reassigned, especially considering the fact that another instructor would destroy all of the progress he'd made with the Uzumaki boy over the last year and change. Progress that had curbed the boy's behavior and toned down his pranks somewhat.

Sasuke's fangirls had been split on the issue of the baby, especially after the boy had once gotten them to change Shiro's diaper, and they swiftly discovered that motherhood wasn't nearly as glamorous as it was made out to be. The look on the Takeda girl's face when she caught sight of the contents of the diaper had been absolutely priceless. He wished he could have seen the look on the Uchiha boy's face when he discovered that babies didn't just pee like those "drink and wet" dolls that were so popular with small girls.

Naruto was now yelling at Sasuke for "being a jerk" and "Hogging Shiro to himself". From the look on Sasuke's face, the situation would be escalating very quickly. He should go over there before things devolved into a fistfight which Shiro could get caught in the middle of.

&!&!&!&!&

The Third Hokage sat at his desk reading the report on Uchiha Shiro's latest physical examination. The baby was in good health as always, which meant that he would have no reason to remove him from his cousin's custody on those grounds. According to the results of Uchiha Sasuke's last examination, his health had improved since the change in caretakers. He had been rather disappointed in the Uchiha boy's last caretaker who had apparently given the boy and his self-appointed charge a minimum amount of care in hopes that the boy would give up and allow someone else to take care of his infant cousin.

Uchiha Sasuke had proven to be rather independent, determined, and resourceful. He also had an unusual ally in one Hyuuga Hiashi. This was rather surprising because the Hyuuga had been traditionally opposed to the Uchiha on just about every matter for generations.

He had investigated the Uchiha boy's reasons for his distrust of Naruto, and what he'd found had saddened him and worried him to a degree. With his orders for those who had been close to his father to keep their distance so they wouldn't risk giving his identity as the Yondaime's son away, he had removed almost everyone who would have cared for the boy, almost completely isolating him. And, the effects of the isolation were starting to show. Actually, they'd been showing for a long time, but he'd been ignoring them in favor of the boy's happy-go-lucky facade.

He would have to do something about that, and soon, before the boy became completely unreachable. So far, the only people that the boy seemed to actually trust were him and Umino Iruka.

Perhaps if he brought Hatake Kakashi in earlier than he had planned to...

**Edited on 3/17/2012**


End file.
